We shot Taylor a few questions about his seven-year plan. He responded: “The seven year idea is my own and I have been promoting it for more than a decade. It does not have a chance at Columbia or most other places.”

@Alum I echo the first comment. Prof. Helfand’s arrangement is no secret; someone as interested in tenure as Prof. Taylor must know about it. Maybe his idea and Helfand’s have important differences. If so, I’d be interested in learning what they are.

@Another Alum As a former graduate student myself, I’ve seen that tenure is a pretty broken system. I just went for a M.A. myself, but then number of brilliant PhD student dropouts I’ve come to know is astounding. These people know many languages and are teaching at fine universities, usually for almost no money, and usually great frustrating and leave academia. Those that do get PhDs are languishing in non-tenure track positions, overworked and underpaid.

This system needs to be fixed, lest the quality of education at most of America’s colleges and universities be greatly diminished.

@Tenure In the current system, people spend 7 years playing politics to get tenure. Under Taylor’s system, people would apply for a new contract ever 7 years, so let’s figure that they would have to spend the last 2-3 years of each contract playing politics. An academic career can last 30, 40, 50 years. Let’s say 40, for argument’s sake. That’s 5 contracts, which means 10-15 years of kowtowing to the powers that be. So we get more intellectual conformism and sycophancy from professors.

Not to mention the fact that academic projects tend to be long-term projects. It can take five, ten, fifteen years for a full idea to come to fruition. Do we want our professors to just work on the 7-year calendar, constantly scraping up something to show to the panel reviewing their applications? Or do we want them to actually spend their (at least tenured) careers doing meaningful research?